Mauricio travels

USA vs. Europe, round 1

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 23:48:20 -0400

So after four months, I’m finally back home.

From what I understood, some people have problems adjusting to life back home or end up complaining too much about how different things are here and how things should be done like they are in Europe. Thankfully, I’m not one of those people. I’m happy to be back in the USA after two months away doing things like wandering, jumping off waterfalls, walking through graveyards and red light districts at night, taking part in rave parades, and visiting castles nestled in the mountains.

As I said in my journal on Prague, I was getting tired of the whole traveling thing. Long train rides, sleepless weeks, wearing a backpack every day of the week (school things on weekdays, lots of clothes and travel items on weekends), and homework wears you down. We never really had any down time at all in the past two months, now that I think about it. I’m honestly tired of traveling now, and I’m not looking forward to being in a car for thirteen hours when I head back to Blacksburg in August.

I weighed myself for the first time since early May when I finally arrived back home on Saturday. I lost 15 pounds in the past two months. I attribute this to two things: 1) my constant walking around cities (and subsequent sore feet at the end of each day), and 2) malnutrition. Or whatever you want to call ‘eating less food.’

On the subject of food, I was so glad to see that the University of Muenster (a.k.a. WWU - don’t ask me why that’s the acronym) had a lot more food on a plate for lunch than the Burgundy School of Business in Dijon. For roughly the same price, I got a full serving of meat, pasta/fries, and salad. On the downside, water wasn’t free at the cafeteria in Muenster, unlike Dijon, where you could get a pitcher full of water from a sink for free. Granted, it was room temperature, but still. The Germans like their cheap food a lot more than the French. It could also be that the cost of living is higher in France. I think this might be the case, considering how much time off they get every year and other things that make people’s lives easier in France.

As for public transportation? Well, it’s not the greatest in south Florida. In fact, it’s probably one of the worst systems known to man. To get from my house to downtown Miami, you have to take a car for 30 minutes to reach the Tri-Rail station, which runs parallel to I-95. Then, when you enter Miami-Dade County, you have to transfer to the Metrorail, Miami-Dade’s own train system. After that, you have to get off at a Metrorail stop to transfer to the Metromover, Miami’s own tram system. This has taken my dad around two hours for a trip that usually takes 45 minutes by car…if the traffic is good.

By comparison, France and Germany have it a lot better. Their solution to getting around? A nationwide train system that’s cheap and easy to understand. I can’t speak much for France aside from the fact that the TGV is a very widely-used high-speed rail system in the country, but I can talk about the ICE and the rail system in Germany. In Muenster, every bus route stopped at the Hauptbanhof, or the main train station in the city. From there, you could just about go anywhere in Germany with a rail pass. From my dorm, I could take public transportation to the train station, which could then take me anywhere I wanted in the country (and even Europe) without having to step foot in a car. This is the big problem with our public transportation system here in Florida. It involves me having to get into a car. The nearest bus stop is two miles away, and it doesn’t even stop anywhere near a Tri-Rail station. Because the only link to Miami runs north and south throughout Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade counties, it leaves out everyone else living around south Florida, including myself.

Phew. There’s my rant on the poor state of public transportation. It’s mostly fueled by my lack of car. But then again, if people in Europe can get anywhere without a car, why can’t we? Yes, we’re a lot bigger than those countries across the Atlantic, but then again, we have a stronger economy than many of those countries combined. It’s frustrating for me.

Next up, we have the topic of guilt. I tried learning German to carry out my own conversations with the Germans in Germany, and what happened? I ended up speaking English with the Germans in Germany. I admit that it was a bit too easy to just ask for help in English because most of them learn English in school. But I did try asking for directions in German once. And what I got in response was lots of words stringed together in German very quickly and her pointing left, then right, then left again. I had to say “I’m sorry, do you speak English?” in German. Even if she spoke slower, I couldn’t figure out what she was saying. Like I said, guilt. I wanted to show that we weren’t all lazy, loud people who didn’t bother speaking English. (And to be honest, some of us in the group were. And it was embarrassing to me when I saw it happen, especially because of the volume that they would speak to the person in France or Germany. But I won’t name names.) I do know that when I come back, though, I’ll try Rosetta Stone-ing it a lot more in-depth.

I don’t miss a lot of the cars. This applies mostly to France, though. Over there, people prefer what I call ‘middle-heavy’ car designs. I don’t know what to exactly call it, but the cars that are rounder in the middle (as opposed to more aerodynamic, which is what most people here like) are the cars that dominate in France. That’s why I never saw Infinitis, Nissans, Chevys, or Jeeps, but instead, I saw Peugeots, Fiats, Seats, and Citroens. In Germany, they love their station wagons and Smart cars. I can deal with that, especially since they also love their Volkswagens, BMWs, and Mercedes-Benz.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some stuff that I’d like to compare, but this is all I can think of for now. I’m just glad to be back home and I’m glad that I’m not traveling for the time being. Time to sit back, relax, and watch TV for the next month.

Prague - the great winding-down

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 23:13:00 -0400

I’ve been on this trip for almost two months now. I feel like I’ve gotten used to the trains, the lack of water fountains, and the lack of free ketchup. I can deal with my limited knowledge of French and German pretty well. But this weekend, I went somewhere that added a new twist to my trip: a country that spoke a language I didn’t know at all.

During the Cold War, the Czech Republic was the country that my dad was stationed near when he was in the Army. Being the Communist country that it was, it wasn’t possible for my dad to enter this place. So I went over there in an attempt to get even further out of my comfort zone and to fulfill a request of my dad’s: bring back some coasters. (Yes, I brought back a few from Prague.) I looked up some Czech phrases before I left, made sure I had my tickets/passport, and hoped for the best.

A little bit past midnight, I was at the Hamm train station, waiting for the City Night Line train to pull up to the platform so I could get to sleep in the train. If you don’t know about the CNL, it’s the overnight train in Germany that has compartments for multiple beds. In my case, it was six beds in one room. Three bunk beds on both sides of the compartment. I couldn’t see my way in, so the conductor had to use a flashlight to show me to my bed. We were basically packed like sardines in there, and I hit my head on the bed above me at least three times that night. At least the bed wasn’t uncomfortable. The family that took up the other five beds, though, got up at 5 AM to get off the train in Berlin. And there were no showers in the train as far as I know. But I did get to watch the sun rise at 4 AM…only because I was woken up by some snoring from the person in the bed across from me. It was nice to see it with the wind turbines spinning in the air, though.

I arrived in Prague at 11 AM, armed with clothes, a camera, and handwritten directions to the hostel. It was intimidating at first to look at all the signs in Czech and have only a few signs in English. I can’t imagine not knowing English and coming to America, where virtually none of our signs are in Czech, let alone any other language. Thankfully, though, we have pictures to guide us. And my directions that have certain Czech words on them. The big help was the Czech word for tram: ‘tram.’ I followed that sign to the tram that I had to take, but the tram stations don’t do a good job of telling which direction it is going, so I was banking on the tram going towards the hostel. And thankfully, I was right. So I proceeded to check in to the Czech Inn.

A word about the hostel: for something that cost 16 euros a night, I don’t usually expect quality. At the very least, clean sheets and maybe breakfast. The Czech Inn is so influenced by modern design that I don’t think I’ll ever find myself in a more modern hostel or hotel. Huge letters adorn the door into your room, words placed vertically in super-thin fonts tell you which bathroom you’re about to walk into, and bathroom sinks are huge and square. And also, as a bonus, the pillows are about the size of a 5-year old child.

I walked into the room to find two other people in there. I didn’t get to meet the first one for so long, and the other was Abby. She goes to the University of Texas and was here a day early before her study abroad program began here in Prague. Originally, I was planning on either going around Prague with some of my friends who had already made it to the city the night before, but because my train ran late, a good number of them were gone already. And the week before in Munich, I had made some new friends and walked around the city after meeting them on a tour of Dachau, so I decided to go the ‘lone backpacker’ route that I have used so many times already on this trip: met someone new who was also here on their own and go around the city for the first time.

I’ll admit something here: I was not as outgoing and explore-happy as I have been during the rest of the trip. When I went to Nice, Scott and I covered a lot of ground in Nice, Eze, and then Monaco, all in a 12-hour walking trip. In Paris, we visited the graves of Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. In Berlin, we discovered a ‘rave parade.’ Here? I went on a free walking tour and went to Prague Castle. I like Prague, but I feel like I underutilized it. Maybe it’s an effect of the constant traveling and walking that I’ve been doing since May. Maybe it’s the lack of planning on my part leading up to this weekend. Whatever the cause, I felt like I wasn’t doing enough here. Thankfully, Abby made the trip around Prague a lot better. She’s only the second person I know that watches Fringe AND listens to LCD Soundsystem. That’s a perfect combination to me. We took lots of pictures of Prague and of each other looking weird and looking good doing it (as far as my low battery would allow me during the afternoon).

We ate at a restaurant, ordering sausages with horseradish, potato chips (I don’t know why I was thinking French fries when I read the word ‘crisps’), and potato pancakes (her choice). We also spent a good amount of time at a bookstore that we happened to randomly pass by. I got to read an entire graphic novel that I would have never heard of, and she got to read and then sleep for a few minutes while I finished the graphic novel I was reading. We also went over to the Lennon Wall, famous for a person’s writing on a wall after John Lennon’s death. It is basically Prague’s version of the Berlin Wall’s East Side Gallery, with people writing all over the wall, putting their names, or quotes from Beatles songs. It’s all really colorful and nice-looking, I think. At the wall, we ran into a lot of

The Prague Castle is a large complex of buildings and doesn’t exactly remind me of a castle in the style of Neuschwanstein Castle in southern Bavaria. However, it was still impressive, the president of the Czech Republic does live there, and as a bonus, they have Buckingham Palace-style guards dressed in blue pseudo-guarding the palace. I say pseudo because they still let tourists inside so they could view places like the palace museum and the cathedral. We got there at 6 PM, though, so we couldn’t actually go inside the paid parts of the castle, but we did get to go around the courtyards of the castle for free. The view up top was really nice, but I can’t help but compare it to places like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris or the observatory at Interlaken or even the Chateau in Nice. This is what I was afraid of: negatively comparing places like the Prague Castle to places I have been to during my time here in Europe. Maybe if I visited the paid parts of the castle, I would have enjoyed it even more, but as it stood, the best thing that stood out to me was the blue guards, the catapult replica, and the fact that I could hear an opera somewhere down in the city from my ledge at the top of the castle.

That night, the two of us and another person who moved into our room that night (who lives in Parkland, the city right above mine in south Florida!) decided to head to a nightclub, but only after we got some Chinese food at a restaurant nearby. We were on our way out of the lobby when I saw a lot of the guys who were in Munich the day before check in at the front desk. So I invited them to come with us somewhere downtown. Where to? We didn’t know. After we got our food, we took a tram and a train to the Old Town in search of something that looked fun. We found a club that was advertising drum and bass music (a subgenre of electronic music), and it was alright, but it wasn’t the crazy atmosphere that I was expecting. Not enough strobe lights, basically. But it was alright for the two hours that we were there for. What wasn’t alright, though, was the fact that we got there at 1 AM. But that’s what happens when you are walking around downtown not knowing where to go or where anything is.

The next morning, Abby had to leave to start her week-long program in Prague. We ate breakfast, talked about our plans for that night (meet up again, talk through Facebook), and said our goodbyes. As a side note, though, she hasn’t been able to use the internet at her hotel, so the plans for the second night fell through because of it. Jessica (the other person who I met in my hostel room) and I decided to take a walking tour of Prague, which was nice. I got to see the Astronomical Clock briefly, and I was taken aback by the size of the crowd waiting for the hour to strike. People’s heads were tilted up towards that clock, waiting for what I guess was a couple of bells, a skeleton on the wall ringing its own bell, and wooden figures moving. It was somewhat anticlimactic, and everyone clapped as if it was the greatest street performance they had ever seen. I didn’t watch it happen, though. I stood under the clock, taking a picture of everyone looking at the clock as the hour hit.

The rest of the trip after the walking tour was very uneventful, partly due to the fact that I took a nap when I got back to the hostel and woke up at 10:30 PM. I was way too comfortable (and still too tired) to get up and go out, so I told Jessica that I’d spend the night in. I’d have to get to the train station by 10:30 the next morning, anyway, so I’d have to pack up and get up early so I could make my way to the train station.

So I started writing this on the train ride back, thinking about everything that I’d done this weekend, or in my case, what I didn’t do. But I can’t help but think that the reason I didn’t do as much or was as ambitious with my travel plans for Prague was because this trip was beginning to wind down. I’ve been here in Europe since mid-May, and I’ve seen some amazing sights in the almost two months that I’ve been here (like the Chateau and the Interlaken observatory, as I mentioned before), and maybe I’m just tired out by now. It would be great to go back home, sit on my couch/bed, watch TV, play Xbox, or just hang out by the pool or in the backyard with my friends. As I’m writing this journal, I feel like it’s all coming to an end so fast. But I’ll come back here someday, and when I do, I’ll be a lot more invigorated and ready to explore Prague better than I had this past weekend.

Hurricane Festival - wet and wild

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 23:12:00 -0400

It was on a whim, really. Kaiser Chiefs? Foo Fighters? The Sounds? Arcade Fire? Sure! Three days out in Middle of Nowhere (a.k.a. Scheeßel), Germany with eight of my friends at the Hurricane Festival? Okay!

…what’s that? We needed a tent? And sleeping bags? And toiletries? Flashlights? And this checklist says to bring a stove? Uh-oh.

I had already bought my tickets, but I don’t think anyone realized the extent of how woefully unprepared we were for a festival experience like this. I had to gather up information on what to pack and let the others know. In addition, I was the one buying the tent that would fit nine people. Not an easy task…at least not until I hit the Hurricane Festival’s Facebook page. They told me to visit a store called Karstadt, which I found was essentially Germany’s version of Walmart. In Muenster, however, this store was four stories tall. It took me a while to find the tent, but I found one that was being advertised as a five-person tent. The diagram showed me that it could easily fit ten people, though. I bought the tent and hoped that the others would promptly pay me back soon.

I had almost missed the train, not realizing that the bus would take around 40 minutes to reach the station. When I got off the bus with the tent in hand, two of my friends were waiting outside. One of them took my tent and ran inside, letting the others know that it was time to run to the train platform. We all ran inside, sprinted up the stairs, and made it just as the train was pulling in. Close call. We were a two-hour train ride from Scheeßel now. As we talked on the train, we talked about if we knew just what we got ourselves into. All I knew was that this would be a story someday. And here it is.

We arrived at around 7 PM in Scheeßel’s tiny train station. The only time they ever get so many people is during this festival. It’s essentially farms, a few roads, and more farms. We were only concerned with getting to the farm where the festival was located. We took at ten-minute walk towards the countryside (basically, we just followed everyone else) until we got to the wristband station. This startion took more than an hour to get through, so we were standing and listening to the bands that were playing at the moment. It wasn’t a great wait, but we finally made it in. But we were probably one of the last ones to find a campsite. Everywhere we walked, there were tents and people. Some were dressed in crazy costumes, others were chanting silly drinking songs. There were lots of flags and banners strewn about. I likened it to a peasant town, but with nicer tents.

We walked for about half an hour looking for an empty place to put down our tent, and we finally found one at the corner of the campsite. This was a big campsite, by the way: the festival reported that over 70,000 people made it to Hurricane this year, most of them being the three-day campers like ourselves. We removed the tent from its huge duffel bag and laid it out. Unfortunately for us, the instructions were missing. We were yelling at one another and telling others not to touch anything until we laid the tent poles up to figure out what holes they go through. We found after ten minutes of searching and arguing that the poles and the tent holes were color-coded, making the set-up a lot easier. But when we got it the tent up, it was almost time for Arcade Fire to start. We threw our bags inside, placed a padlock on the entrance, and made our way to the festival grounds.

After another long line getting into the festival grounds and waiting in line for a security guard who took longer to let people in than all of the other lines, we were finally inside. We were somewhat far from the stage and Arcade Fire, but I enjoy their music either way. They didn’t win the Grammy for Album of the Year for no reason. The others didn’t want to see the entire set, however. They wanted to watch Sum 41 perform at midnight, so they wanted to leave early to get a spot in the tent. This put me at a conflict with the rest of the group. Should I go with them and see a band that I really only know a few songs from, or stay and watch a band I know I love? I realize that everyone in middle school (and probably even elementary school) listened to Sum 41, but not me. I decided to split with the group for the rest of the night. After Arcade Fire’s set was over, I decided to head over to the second main stage to watch the Chemical Brothers perform at midnight. It was alright, but not the awesome party I was expecting from them. I decided to see who else was performing at that time. I saw Sum 41’s tent, but you couldn’t hear them outside because of how loud the music from The Chemical Brothers was.

I decided to head to the White Tent to see Digitalism. I had heard of them before, but I hadn’t really listened to their music. All I knew was that they were electronic musicians from Germany. In fact, they were from nearby Hamburg, so this must’ve been a special occasion for them. I walked in, and was amazed by how much fun everyone was having, including Digitalism themselves. They consisted of two people on different machines around the stage and a drummer. It made for a perfect combination of both electronic beats and live ones. People were jumping, the tent was filled with strobe lights and glow sticks, and it was a good end to what was a rough day that started with the almost-missed train ride to Scheeßel.

I made it back to the tent at 2:30 to find the others already back and sleeping. I thought they would still be on their way back from the Sum 41 concert, but it turned out that they couldn’t make it into the tent, and all they could hear outside the tent was The Chemical Brothers, so they decided to leave early. I felt good about my decision to stay and watch Arcade Fire, but I can’t help but wonder how much better it would be if they all decided to visit the Digitalism tent to end the night the right way. Oh well. I had other things to worry about now, like figuring out how to make myself comfortable in the tent.

I didn’t buy a sleeping bag. I didn’t buy a comfy mat to lie on. I had a sheet and a comforter. This was what was going to last me two nights in this tent. Lying on the sheet was basically the same thing as sleeping on the ground. There isn’t any cushioning, just the assurance that you won’t get dirt all over your back when you sleep. It wasn’t comfortable at all. It was like sleeping on concrete. And it got colder as the night went on. I woke up multiple times trying to find a comfortable way to sleep, but I couldn’t do it. And as the night went on, the temperature went down. Way down. I had to get up and put on a second layer of clothing and my hoodie to stay warm under my comforter. It wasn’t the greatest of sleeping conditions. The icing on the cake? The fact of life in Germany: sunrise begins at 4 AM. It was bright by 5 AM. It’s hard to sleep when the sun is hitting the wall of your tent. But I did after about half an hour of trying.

I woke up at 8 AM from water dripping on my face. My first reaction was, “This thing isn’t waterproof?!” But then my senses kicked in. The tent was a sauna now. Condensation was dripping from the roof of the tent. And I was still in my multiple layers and my thick blanket. I quickly got out of the layers and out of the blanket. I was now awake and sweating, and everyone else was sleeping and probably melting without even realizing it. What do I do? Find food and take a shower. I realized something after doing this: festival showers are in one big room. And that’s all I’ll say about that. When I came back to the tent, I opened some windows, prompting some people to wake up and yell at me for opening windows. But people slowly got up and realized the same thing that woke me up: the temperature inside was way too high. So they let me open more windows.

Planning for Saturday’s concerts, I found that a lot of the bands that I wanted to see were playing one after another on the same stage. The Sounds, Friendly Fires, Two Door Cinema Club, and Kaiser Chiefs. I had to be there. And luckily for me again, everyone else wants to see Sublime and Incubus. So what did that mean? I watched Sick Puppies with the group and then I broke off from them for the rest of the day…again. I won’t talk much about the concerts that day, aside from that they were all amazing. I even made a new friend while waiting between sets in the front row. But I’ll point out something interesting. Two Door Cinema Club isn’t a very well-known band outside alternative circles in the USA. But here in Germany? They’re treated as if they were the second coming of The Beatles. Girls screaming everywhere and pushing to get into the front row of the stage.

(Side note: did I mention I was in the front row of the Blue Stage? It was great. It involved a lot of planning on eating and drinking (and fighting to use the bathroom) in order to stay in the front row, but it was worth it.)

Once again, I came back to everyone else sleeping in the tent, and dozed off, but the second night was even colder. I’m sure that it dropped down to the lower 40s or even upper 30s that night, something I was not prepared for at all when I looked at the weather reports. Not even my multiple layers and comforter could keep me warm this time, which was bad. I didn’t get that much sleep that night as a result. But the next morning, I ate a potato chip and cookie brekafast…and I didn’t use the shower this time around. The lines get really long really fast, and they got VERY long on Sunday morning.

I can’t say much about Sunday, since I didn’t see anyone. It was pouring rain when I woke up (also part of the reason why my breakfast consisted of snacks and why I didn’t shower). Some of the people in the group had left early because of it. I was ready for something like this, though. I was going to use the plastic bags that I had bought on Thursday to put over my shoes and walk around. And my poncho would keep me dry. Right? Almost. The plastic bags fell apart off my shoes very quickly, exposing my nice running shoes to the worst of Mother Nature. They’re sitting in my closet caked in mud right now. Because my shoes were exposed to the mud, it was also exposed to the rain. It got all the way to my socks. I was freezing now, and I had no clean change of socks anymore. I also didn’t feel very well after the morning. Not the best combination. Long story short, I took my bags and left ahead of the rest of the group, who had already left to see Sunday’s bands. I was freezing at the train station, but thankfully, there was an empty seat for me in the train back to my dorm.

In the days that I was out on the festival grounds, it was a great time listening to the bands I love (Arcade Fire, Kaiser Chiefs) and getting to hear great bands that I had never listened to (Digitalism, Brother). The campgrounds were a new experience for me. Mud and dirt everywhere, the nine people sleeping in a five-person tent, people singing and dancing everywhere, the crazy costumes, surviving on potato chips and cookies all day, even the showers: this was all part of the story. I don’t see myself going to another festival anytime soon (mostly because I’ll probably be doing an internship next year and because Blacksburg is nowhere near any festivals during the school year), so getting to do a festival like this in Europe and getting to be in the front row for almost the entirety of Saturday was an experience. Like I said before the weekend even started: this is a story.

Berlin - where the wild things are

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 23:06:00 -0400

We just got into Muenster after leaving Dijon, France for good, and the first thing I noticed was that there were bicyclists EVERYWHERE. Looking out of the bus, I was pretty sure that at least 80% of the people on the sidewalks were biking instead of walking. It was weird to see. I moved into my new dorm (which, by the way, includes its own bathroom and kitchen!), and I had time to rest before I left the next morning for Berlin.

We made it to the train station an hour early. We had no idea what to expect from European trains, having taken the bus around France and Switzerland in the first couple of weeks. We went to the ticket office to validate our eight-day rail passes (two for each weekend that we’d be going around Germany), and then we were on our way to the platform for 45 minutes of standing and waiting for the train. When it finally came, we stayed on it until we reached Hamm, where we would take the train that everyone talks about: the Inter-City Express, or ICE.

The train is very popular in Germany for lots of reasons. One of them is that it has a top speed of 300 kilometers per hour, or around 185 miles per hour. It’s pretty cool to watch the countryside speed by with the turbines spinning in the air. What isn’t cool, though, is the fact that people reserve the train seats beforehand. We ended up sitting on the floor for most of the ride between Hamm and Berlin.

It took around five hours to get to Berlin on the ICE, and when we got out of the train and into the Berlin Hauptbanhof (Berlin’s main station), we entered what I could only describe as a four-story shopping mall and food court. There were restaurants on both sides of the platforms going up multiple stories, clothing stores, and even two grocery stores on opposite ends of the station. Nobody really knew how to get to the hotel, though, so I had to look at directions on a map in the train station. I wrote down the directions and took a picture of the map on my phone, and we walked out of the train station, hoping we were going the right way.

Walking out of the Hauptbanhof was a bit strange. The building itself looked nice, but everything around it just looked somewhat depressing or run-down. There were also elevated pipes running alongside the street, which I found very weird. The train connection to the hostel wasn’t accessible from the Hauptbanhof either, which was really inconvenient. But when we did find the subway (called the U-Bahn in all the German cities), we bought day passes for our weekend there and made our way to the hostel.

The City Hostel was a pretty decent hostel. Big, too. It looked too big for its own good. But then someone told me that the hostel actually used to be the former North Korean embassy. It made a lot more sense, given its mundane architecture. And it would explain why there was another North Korean building literally right next to it. The front of the current North Korean building even has pictures of Kim Jong Il waving to crowds and in a lab coat plastered on the wall of the fence. I couldn’t help but wonder if the girl and the father playing in the front yard inside the gate were North Koreans as well. I never found out.

Most of my first afternoon in Berlin was devoted to the Berlin Wall and the Olympastadion. Scott, Ryan, Elmer, and I headed over to the outskirts of the city to visit the stadium first. It was built for the 1936 Olympics, back when the Nazis were in power. Nazi architecture can be seen from its usage of large stone blocks and lots of right angles, a reminder of how precise the Nazis wanted everything to look. We were about to head through the gate when we ran into a security guard with a New England Patriots cap on. He said that the stadium was closed due to events that they were preparing for. In short: the FIFA Women’s World Cup ruined our stadium tour. It took us a while to get to the stadium in the first place, too.

But instead of heading back to the hostel, we decided to head back over to what was formerly East Berlin to check out the East Side Gallery. The East Side Gallery is a collection of paintings on what is left of the Berlin Wall in that part of the city. It’s a lot less somber than what the wall’s history would suggest. Lots of abstract figures line the wall. Some are more straightforward and to the point. Most are just paintings for the sake of being paintings and have nothing to do with Berlin’s conflicted past. And as a bonus, Elmer got some great pictures of Berlin at sunset. But sunset tells me one thing in Germany: it’s almost 10 PM. And I wanted to get a taste of Berlin’s electronic scene.

I had no idea where the group wanted to go. The group didn’t know where they wanted to go, either. Luckily for us, we met a group of people who had actually graduated from Virginia Tech two years ago. And they were staying at the same hostel as us! We talked for a while over a few drinks, and they told us about this ‘legendary’ nightclub called Tresor. I had never heard of it, but from what they told us (“it used to be a power plant, but then it closed down and Tresor took the building over”), it sounded pretty cool. We decided to head over there and see what it was all about.

Getting out of the taxi and looking at the building, it definitely has that ‘abandoned warehouse’ feel. But obviously, it wasn’t an abandoned warehouse, but an abandoned power plant. After paying the 10 euro cover charge, we walked into the dimly-lit building. The entire building was lit in dark red and blue lights. You could hear the bass permeating throughout the hallways. It was somewhat disorienting at first, to be honest. We headed up some stairs to find a DJ playing some house music. It was alright, but not the kind of thing I was expecting from a club like this. I was hoping for some crazier electronic music. So what did I do? What I do best, obviously: go exploring with Scott. We walked around a bunch of hallways and stairs until we found one interesting hallway with lights flashing down this long hallway. We had no idea where it led to, but we wanted to follow the flashing lights.

We entered a room with thumping bass, smoke machines, and lots of strobe lights. If you tried to follow movement, you would just be disoriented by the ghosted images that your eyes capture from the brief strobe lights. As Ben Folds put it, we ran into strange machines “repeating beats and thumping bass.” And the repeated beats, along with the strobe lighting, drove people into a trance-like state of dancing. I can’t really say much more about the night after this because this was what the rest of the night was like at Tresor. And it was amazing.

The next day, the group walked over to the Brandenburg Gate to start the free walking tour of Berlin. We were ready to brave the large crowds also waiting to do the same when Scott tapped my shoulder. He forgot his camera. Time to break off from the group and head back to the hostel for his camera. But most importantly, time for The Adventures of Mauricio and Scott, Part III.

We bought a day pass for the U-Bahn and made our first stop at the Topography of Terror building. Outside the building, there was a portion of the Berlin Wall still standing. Unlike the East Side Gallery, however, this portion was fenced off from people coming up to it and painting/drawing all over it. This portion of the wall elicited a different emotion than the other, more lively portion of the wall. This portion reminded us of some of the desperation that the people of East Berlin felt more than 22 years ago. The Topography of Terror building, right next to the wall detailed the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany up to its fall in the 1940s. We spent about three or four hours inside, learning all about the pieces that fell into place for the Nazis to gain voters and how they created a monopoly of violence all over Europe in the 1930s and 40s. It was definitely one of the more sobering parts of Berlin, but also one of the most important ones to have gone to, in my opinion.

Walking down the street from the Topography building towards the Brandenburg Gate, we passed by a Holocaust memorial, officially known as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Until I looked it up, though, it was just a huge area of stone slabs of varying heights. I thought it was a group of stone slabs that you could climb up and stand on if you wanted, walking through the slabs revealed something weird: the ground didn’t stay level. The tops of the stone slabs slightly varied in height, but the floor kept sinking as I went further into the sea of slabs. I thought I’d easily be able to climb these slabs from the floor next to it, but soon, the slabs became more than four times my height. It was one of the more interesting things that I visited. Of course, I had my fun with the maze of slabs. As Scott walked down between the rows of slabs, I would try to run to a parallel row, run ahead, and scare him at an intersection ahead of him. My eight-year-old self would have absolutely loved this place. Of course, it doesn’t do well for conveying the memorial’s true purpose. But it’s still something interesting to visit.

The Brandenburg Gate was next to it, but we didn’t spend much time there aside from picture-taking and talking to a couple who were Virginia Tech graduates (I found them from afar because one of them was wearing a 2004 Orange Effect shirt!). There was no train station nearby, though. We knew that the Victory Column was down the road that the Gate faces, so we went that way. I severely underestimated the length of time it would take for us to walk to the Column. We spent a lot of time just walking past parks to reach it, and when we did take it, we decided to just walk up to it and take a picture because the viewing balcony from up on the Column didn’t seem like it would’ve been worth the cost. Besides, I’ve seen views from the Interlaken Observatory and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, so a view of a long road wasn’t new to me. But at least the Berlin Zoo was nearby.

We didn’t have much time to go around, though. It closed at 6 PM, and we had gotten there at 4 PM. We visited the big attractions: the elephants, the bears, the monkeys. Oh man, the monkeys. Some of them were swinging on ropes for fun, others were picking bugs out of another monkey’s hair, others were slapping each other, and others were sleeping and hugging one another (one of the more heartwarming pictures that I took in Berlin). Spending so much time at these exhibits, though, meant that we just missed the close time of the exhibit that the Berlin Zoo is probably more well-known for: its polar bears. Unfortunately, Knut died this past March, so we wouldn’t have been able to see the Berlin Zoo’s main attraction. But we did get to see a lot of animals that I wouldn’t be able to see at some zoos back home. Let’s just say it’s one of the most visited zoos in Europe for a reason.

The day before, we came back to the hostel from the East Side Gallery when we saw some sort of a festival happening on the street from the confines of our train. We wanted to come back today to see what it was all about. We were told by receptionists at the hostel that because it was a national holiday in Germany, Berlin was celebrating with a huge street festival. It was so huge that we couldn’t even move around at walking speed when we reached it. We saw things like drumlines, drum circles, Spanish food (I bought churros and Guarana!), and lots and LOTS of people. Scott and I came across a stage where a woman was yodeling and two other people were playing guitar and drums while she yodeled. It was a sight to see. I decided I had enough of that, though, and told Scott that we should go down the street to see what else there was in store with this festival.

We went down a street that looked absolutely trashed. There was nothing happening, just people walking, two guys laying on the ground, trash strewn everywhere, and graffiti on the walls. Walking down this street, though, we saw two important things: 1) A cross-dressing drummer performing on the street (if you’re wondering, she wasn’t very good, but I don’t think people could look away from it for obvious reasons), and 2) a rave parade.

I know what you’re thinking. “Mauricio, what’s a rave parade?” It’s a term I made up based on what I saw at this parade. Imagine having 96 truck floats at a parade. Now imagine that all of these floats were intricately decorated with various things, had people on them, and had a DJ on the back of each truck. Now imagine the truck equipped with huge sound systems for the DJs and smoke machines being attached to the backs of these trucks. Now imagine as the truck passed you by on the street, you could just walk on the street and follow the truck as it went down the route, dancing with a mob of other people as you all made your way down the street. That’s what I call a rave parade. And I don’t think I’ll ever see anything like it again. At least, never in America. To be honest, it was one of the greatest things I probably will ever be able to take a part in. Each truck was blasting different genres of music, from trance to drum and bass to conga to Jamaican dance hall. There was something for everyone at this rave parade. We were here for about two hours, until the sun began to go down. When we got back to the hostel, we found that everyone had already left to do a pub crawl. So our day ended right there.

The next morning, we checked out and paid a visit to the Neues Museum. This museum is famous for its extensive collection of Egyptian artifacts. I won’t dwell much on this, aside from the fact that I thought it was cool to see an Egyptian sarcophagus in the traditional gold paint and then in the more human-like colors, influenced by the Romans’ rule of Egypt later on in history. But if you wanted to know, this museum was definitely worth it, and everyone should visit this place if they enjoy learning about ancient history.

Berlin was a great place to visit, and I hope that I can visit this place again in the future. The nightlife is crazy, the people are nice, the history is very interesting, and maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll run into a rave parade. You can’t plan this kind of stuff, but if you end up finding something you didn’t plan on seeing, it makes the retrospective that much better.

Interlaken - extreme to the extreme

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 21:49:00 -0400

I got off the bus at Interlaken and immediately took in the sights…or whatever wasn’t being covered by the clouds. I was staying at Balmer’s, a well-known hostel to backpackers around the world. It looked like a nice place to stay compared to the other hostels, which weren’t really located as centrally as Balmer’s was. I was placed in a room apart from everyone else in my group, which I was completely fine with, considering I booked my own hostel in Nice the weekend before. I didn’t really get to get to talk to my hostelmates much this time around, but that was fine. I had a lot of stuff on my schedule for Saturday.

On Saturday morning, I got up and looked out my window. It was a great day outside, cool enough to wear a long-sleeved shirt in the morning. I had breakfast (which wasn’t as fully-featured as I was expecting) with some friends, then went to the front desk to schedule a time to go canyoning. For people who aren’t exactly sure what that means, it’s going down a canyon river by walking down the fast-moving riverbed, rappelling, climbing down rocks, and even jumping off waterfalls. I was planning on going with a group of 10 people, but it seemed that a bit of miscommunication (or rudeness from the receptionist towards us, depending on who you ask) caused half of us to get booked, and the other half to be shut out because it sold out. The rest of us were fragmented into smaller groups like canyon jumping, whitewater rafting, and the people who held out for canyoning at a later time. In the latter, that group consisted of me and Ryan.

In the meantime, though, we headed to the main street of Interlaken, passing a Hooters, numerous souvenir shops, and a sex shop to reach the Harderbahn, a tram that took us to the top of a tower overlooking Interlaken. The tram ride took eight minutes, made my ears pop, and gave us a small taste of the view that the observation tower would give us. You only had to walk five minutes from the tram station at the top to reach what was probably the best view of the Swiss Alps that many people will get in their lifetimes.

Interlaken means ‘between two lakes,’ or so I’ve heard. It would make sense given the wording and the location. Looking down towards Interlaken was nothing short of breathtaking. Trees lined the steep valleys on opposite sides of Interlaken, and two enormous, eerily blue lakes dotted the other opposite sides. On the far right, clouds topped the mountaintops along the valleys, as if the clouds were the metal barriers for a highway in the sky. Below, ou could make out the cars driving up and down the quiet avenues of Interlaken. Above, you could see parasailers and parachuters making their way down, probably taking in the amazing view that they are getting. And looking forward, you can see Jungfrau, one of the highest points in Europe, and accessible by train for more than 100 euros. I didn’t have the money or the time to do that, so I stuck with what I was doing afterwards: canyoning.

Ryan and I met the group just outside of Balmer’s, and the canyoning tour guide met us there as well. He led us over to their home base (only two buildings down) to get changed into wetsuits, wetshoes, and wetjackets. Anything to keep myself from freezing to death in that cold mountain water. We took a 10-minute bus ride up some mountains and then got out of the van, still in our wetsuits. Where was the water? It turned out we had to hike ten more minutes in our uncomfortable shoes up a trail to reach it. The tight wetsuit didn’t help me out, either. But we got there, regardless. The water was rushing, but our guide told us to get in. The first jump into the water is always the worst, of course.

Our first stop in the river (it wasn’t in the canyon just yet) was to rappel down a rock wall. I watched the guide do it and immediately started wondering to myself, “Wait…what?” I couldn’t get what I was supposed to do, even after watching people in front of me do the same. When it was my turn, I even tugged on the guide’s hand as I was going down. That’s how confused I was: I was about to pull down the guide with me, probably to his death (or the ER). I think it was a combination of “Where do I put my foot again?” and “What am I supposed to hold on to?” I ended up losing my footing very close to the top and was just carried down by the rope, hanging in mid-air. Once we all got to the bottom, we made our way down more rocks and river until we reached a waterfall. And lucky for us, we weren’t going to rappel down the side of the waterfall, we were going to jump 30 feet to the water below! Of course, with the ease that I get vertigo, it was going to be hard for me to jump. I watched as the others in the group stepped up and jumped down, screaming in a combination of pure joy and sheer terror. When my turn came up, the guide pointed me to the rock I was supposed to stand on. He then told me that when I jump, I have to lean backwards and bend my legs inward.

“Easy enough, right?”

No.

Either way, I couldn’t turn back now. Not after putting down 120 euros for this. I looked down, forced my eyes to stay open, and jumped down. I still remember jumping off that waterfall and looking forward as my body leaned back and fell into the water. Getting up, though, was another matter. I got water up my nose and was coughing out my lungs. Meanwhile, I was trying to find the wall after gasping for air. I thought I had my back on the wall. Instead, I had my back on one of the people in my group, and I was pushing her against another person in the group. Whoops.

There were two more jumps in this trip, but I started thinking to myself, “Isn’t one jump enough?” It was something I had to do, but it was also something I didn’t want to do deep inside. But that’s what Interlaken is for: conquering your own personal extremes. In this case, it was a 30-foot waterfall. And I conquered it. Of course, there was still more slides and climbing down to do, but this was the main highlight of the three-hour canyoning trip. We made our way to the bottom, walked a little bit more to the van, and made our way back to the home base to dry off and have a free beer (Rugenbräu – brewed in Interlaken, in case you were wondering).

I ended my long day with some other friends at a restaurant. Walking down the main street looking for a cheap place to have dinner, I noticed a man playing the piano in one of the restaurants. This place had to be expensive. Maybe 30 francs? Well, yeah, but they had a dish for the low, low price of 19 francs ($20). We decided that we wouldn’t be able to find anything cheaper than that, so we found a table while I tried finding a waiter. It was harder than it seemed at first. I think there were only two or three waiters at the entire restaurant. In fact, I couldn’t even find them myself. The man playing the piano found the waiters for us! He stopped playing his music and got one of them to take our orders. That’s one point for this restaurant (and the man playing piano). We all decided on the same thing: macaroni, minced meat, and applesauce. Yes, applesauce. It’s a popular dish in Interlaken, apparently. While we waited, we drank our tap water (which was amazing, given our location in the Swiss Alps) and listened to the man on the piano play songs from Mozart and Queen while taking in the sights of the amazing mountain landscape that was within view of our open-air table.

I can’t say that I’ll ever visit here again for sure, but I would really like to. Interlaken is hands-down the most amazing place I’ve ever seen. Nature and extreme sports come together in this tiny village in the Swiss Alps, making the entire stay seem almost surreal. Was I really spending a weekend in paradise? Yes. And I hope I can come back and do it all over again someday.

Monaco & Nice - a nice place to live.

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:14:00 -0400

After a long first week of classes (it felt longer due to the lack of internet in the dorms – what am I supposed to do at night?), it was finally time for our first weekend trip – the French Riviera. Specifically, Nice. It’s a great beach city and within close proximity to two other well-known places: Monaco (the home of the Monte-Carlo, rich people, and the Monaco Formula 1 Grand Prix, and Cannes, the home of the star-studded Cannes Film Festival. The film festival was happening as we were there, and the Grand Prix was going to happen on the weekend after we were there. I was more excited to visit Monaco, so me and a friend added Monaco on our list to visit and explore for the one day we could walk around Nice.

I had a problem checking in to my dorm the night we arrived, though. It was 9 PM, but we arrived in a place different than where I was expecting (the train station in Nice). Instead, we were dropped off at the main plaza in downtown Nice, about a 15 minute walk from where my hostel was located. I didn’t know this, and I didn’t know where we even were. I had to ask someone where we were so I could orient myself and find where I was staying. I stayed at a different dorm from everyone else because I wanted something cheaper, so while just about everyone stayed at one of two hostels, I was the only one that booked at the Hostel Baccarat, near the train station.

I met some cool people in my hostel, though. Three of my hostelmates (is that a word?) were college students and former high school buddies who decided to hitchhike their way up to northern France, starting from Nice. They were set on getting there whatever it took. They drifted apart as friends for a while before meeting up again and deciding to embark on this trip. Another person in my room was a student from China, was going to school in the Netherlands, spending a semester abroad in Paris and the weekend in Nice. Brownie points if you got all that on the first read. Finally, I met a filmmaker who actually had a movie at the Cannes Film Festival, but not one of the main competing films. Nevertheless, his film was selected for screening at the festival out of a pool of hundreds, which is an honor in itself. He is a professor of filmmaking at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois. Finally, I met a Japanese man in his late twenties who was recently laid off and decided to spend money going around Europe before finding another job. “It might be stupid,” he told me, “but I won’t know that until I do it.” Meeting these types of people is what I love about the idea of hostels. While everyone else had rooms with each other, I got to meet totally new people with different reasons for being here. And the Chinese girl who was staying in my hostel said she wanted to go to Monaco, but didn’t know how to get there, so she joined me and my friend, Scott, on our trip around Nice and Monaco.

We made it up to the Chateau, a very nice observation point over the coast of Nice and the Mediterranean, when we met one of Scott’s hostelmates, going to Nice for the weekend on his own. He told us about this village called Eze. I had no idea what to expect except for “it’s very old and it’s very cool,” so we decided to go ahead and find out when the next bus to Eze left from Nice. A big plus was that there was a bus that went from Eze to Monaco, so our schedule for the afternoon was set. We made our way from the Chateau to the bus station…and the bus never came at the scheduled time. So we decided to wait an hour for the next bus and get kebab burgers instead, which weren’t so bad. But when the bus finally came, I was ready for Eze.

Eze is a small village, just as Scott’s hostelmate said, and it was also very cool. It’s been around since 2000 BC, and it was at the highest point in the area surrounding it, making it a very important strategic military point in ancient and medieval times. The alleyways of Eze were very narrow, probably to help keep the sun away during the summer. It was very hot up there, so the shadows of the buildings above us helped. The best part cost five euros, however. It was a botanical garden filled with cactuses and other plants, and it included one of the best views of the Mediterranean and the mountains surrounding it, trumping the view of Nice from the Chateau. Scott said it best when he said “I have literally no words for this.”

We spent a lot of time up there taking pictures of the horizon and the cacti, but we had to catch a bus to Monaco because they only came once an hour. But before we did, Scott went to use the bathroom, which costs 0.40 euros, my first run-in with a paid bathroom. As he was in there, though, we saw the bus come into Eze. I wanted to tell him that the bus was coming, but we were too far from the stop to catch it before it left, and the woman running the bathroom ‘ticket booth’ wouldn’t let me into the bathroom. So we missed a bus…again. We decided to make a quick stop at a grocery store for some bottled water (sold in the handheld, totally-normal-for-France 1.5 liter bottles here) and then stopped at a small bakery. I ordered the usual chocolate croissant to go with my huge water bottle, while Scott and Wen (our new Chinese friend) ordered this strange pastry called a meringue. Scott told me to try it, so I looked at it and asked what was in it.

“Egg whites.”

“Oh.” There went my hunger.

“But it doesn’t taste like it, it’s really sweet.”

I tried it anyway. It tasted pretty good, but I had a weird taste of mouth. Egg whites. Nasty. I had to drink a lot of water to get the taste out. But at least I tried something new. And the bus finally came to take us to the principality of Monaco. That’s right, I learned that Monaco is essentially its own country. I should’ve known that when I heard it being called a ‘tax haven.’

And what a tax haven it is. And a car haven. Upon getting off the bus stop (which, by the way, was painted gold), we were only a short walk away from the Monte-Carlo, one of the most well-known casinos in the world. The rich absolutely love to be seen here, especially in their nice cars. The people whose cars are parked in the front of the casino never fail to impress onlookers’ eyes. And neither does the architecture itself. There were Lamborghinis, Rolls-Royces, Daimlers (as in the company that merged with Chrysler – that specific car had TWO V6 engines inside!), AMGs, and even a US military Jeep. I had to stop taking pictures out of rich person envy.

The Monaco Grand Prix was still a week away, but the track, fences, bumpers, and grandstands were all set up and ready to take on spectators at any moment. We walked along parts of the track, noting the tight hairpin turns that F1 cars would be making here in only a week and the insanely high prices of getting grandstand or even food at a restaurant with a view of the track. The entire city/principality was basically made as a playground for the rich, and the peasants like myself were allowed to visit and ogle at them. I think Monaco motivates people try making more money just because they see how the rich live with their valet-parked cars and luxurious casinos.

At this point, my feet were reaching the point where they were ready to collapse under the weight of the rest of my body. Walking up to the Chateau of Nice, the mountaintop village of Eze, and the mountainside principality of Monaco can do that to you. By the time the three of us made it to the bus (which, by the way, wasn’t covered in my unlimited one-day pass in Nice because Monaco isn’t really a part of Nice…or France), I passed out. And rightly so, because we left at 10 AM and arrived back in Nice at 10 PM. It was a long day of walking and exploring, and I’m glad that I got to see so much, especially considering how other people told me they ended up just laying out on the beach or going shopping. I do a lot of both in Florida, but you can only visit Mediterranean mountains, luxurious places, and ancient villages only a few times in your life. And that was only the first weekend.

Getting started in Dijon, France.

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:32:00 -0400

Dijon is the capital of Burgundy, a state/province/region in France. Guess what Burgundy is famous for. If you guessed burgundy, you’re right. Now guess what Dijon is famous for. Mustard. Good job! So there’s a lot of both here, right? Well, kinda. The French love their wines in general, burgundy included. But I don’t see too much of a prevalence of mustard here aside from the cafeteria serving Dijon mustard. There is also a mustard shop on one of the corners of the main street in Dijon, nearby the bus stop where we get off from our dorm.

Speaking of bus stops, here’s something else I should probably note here: I don’t live in the same campus where I take classes. I am staying at a dormitory at the University of Burgundy. However, I go to school at the Burgundy School of Business, which is in downtown Dijon. UB (it’s a lot easier to type) is on the outskirts of the city. So what do we have to do? Walk from the dorms to the bus stop half an hour before class, take the bus (they give us bus passes) to downtown, then walk a bit more to the school and arrive right on time. It’s not the most convenient option for us (especially after hearing that Oklahoma State students taking classes at BSB are staying at a hotel right next to our bus stop), but I can’t do much about it aside from go with it.

Our first full day in Dijon involved a scavenger hunt around downtown. We visited places like the aforementioned mustard shop (Maille’s Mustard), a nice-looking chocolate artisan shop, very old churches (one with more than 40 gargoyles on it), and huge plazas (there’s a lot of them here), all while eliciting stares from people on the streets. As if they’ve never seen tourists before. Maybe it’s cause they’re wondering why tourists would want to come to Dijon and not Paris. One person, an older-looking woman, stuck her head between a group of us in a circle looking at a map. Why would someone do that? I have no idea. I was ready to yell at her, “What are you doing?” but before I could, she already walked away. She didn’t even say a single word the entire time. She just poked her head in, looked at what we were looking at, then left. Yep, this is only the beginning.

Luckily for me, I’m only taking one business course and French culture class this month in Dijon. Others aren’t as lucky, having to get up for 8 AM finance class. I have French class at 10:30 AM, so I have more time to get ready for class and get sleep at night. I don’t know if I’ll do much traveling and sightseeing in my down time, especially since I’ve already seen so much during the scavenger hunt alone, but we’ll see. Dijon has its nice areas. I still have to get used to this place, though.

There are some things that I don’t like already, though. Everything here is more expensive in general. Food, clothes, everything. I guess I can attribute this to the stronger Euro and the fact that the minimum wage is higher here than in the USA, so everything is more expensive as a result. Also, wi-fi access here is not very good at all. For the most part, the internet only works on our computers past midnight and doesn’t work when we come back from class in the afternoon. It’s hard to try to arrange calling back home through Gmail or Skype when the internet doesn’t work at all. When it does work, it’s very slow, so all we can do is use the BSB’s internet as much as possible. Either that, or go to Mister Kebap for kebabs and free internet. And finally, warm milk. Or maybe a better term is ‘room-temperature milk.’ They put it on their shelves or in bulk bottle packs. They don’t sell gallons of milk here, or even two liters of milk. The biggest size I’ve seen so far is one liter bottles. I guess I’ll have to deal with that. They do have a very small refrigerated milk section, but according to one of my new friends in the dorm (he’s been studying abroad from England since September), refrigerated milk tastes bad here. It’s hard to get used to it. I probably won’t get used to it, actually. But I have to have my cereal.

Anyway, aside from that, I have my laptop and my Easy Mac, so it feels like home in some ways. Aside from the horrible wi-fi access, warm milk, and expensive prices, it’s not too much unlike Blacksburg or Coral Springs. Except everyone speaks French. I don’t want to get too attached, though. I’m leaving for Munster on June 9^th.

We're not living in America.

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 18:26:00 -0400

Where to start?

I guess I should start with the just-about-sleepless red eye flight from DC to London. After getting three or four hours sleep in the two days leading up to the flight, I was hoping to combat jet lag by sleeping on the plane right when we took off. No dice. You know why? On-demand TV screens built into every seat. With more than 30 movies, 20 TV shows, and lots of music albums, all available with the touch of a finger. I HAD to watch Tron: Legacy again. And the airline food kept me awake for a while, too. Vegetarian lasagna, strawberry cheesecake, a Coke, and a loaf of bread all appeared and disappeared in front of me in a matter of minutes. The seats were pretty nice, though, but the sleep just wasn’t happening, even with the cabin lights dimmed low.

My next chance to get sleep (because the flight from London to Paris was only 45 minutes) was on the five-hour bus ride from Paris to Dijon, the place where I’m staying right now. Luckily for me, I had no leg room, and thus, no sleep. There was lots of talking on the bus, too, so that didn’t help much, either. By the time we reached our first rest stop on the bus ride, I had already learned a few things about France:

1) Fiats, Peugeots, and Citroens rule the highways here. Ford is barely to be seen, aside from the Fiesta, and Chevy, Dodge, Chrysler, and Toyota are virtually non-existent (especially the first two, which I think may not even be available here in France).

2) Cars are a lot less sleek-looking here. The French prefer taller, somewhat more ‘boxier’ car designs.

3) Security guards at the airport carry legit guns around the concourse. Or military guys. I’m not sure what they are exactly. All I know is that they carry guns in plain sight. It was somewhat disconcerting at first because I’ve only seen officers with concealed pistols in America.

5) There is a LOT of flat countryside between Paris and Dijon. It’s like Kansas, but with grass and flowers.

And then when we reached the rest stop, I was greeted with great news in the form of a bag of Crispy M&Ms.

Crispy M&Ms! They discontinued those in the USA years ago!

Too bad they cost four euros for a bag. That is too much. But I need to have some while I’m here in Europe.

On the second half of the drive, the atmosphere on the bus suddenly transformed to loud and uncomfortable to quiet…and still uncomfortable. I think people were closing their eyes in the hopes of sleeping, but probably didn’t get lucky. At least, that’s what happened to me.

We finally reached Dijon at 6 PM local time, which was noon back home, and we were ready to either go out or go straight to bed. I fell into the latter group. You would too after a sleepless red eye flight and bus ride. We were given our keys and told where to go. It’s a nice enough room for me. They already had sheets and a pillow for us here, which was nice. We also get our own rooms, which is another big plus. I’ve also brought Easy Mac, Girl Scout cookies, and trail mix with me. The French don’t know what they’re missing out on.